Josh Allred's Blog

I read a license plate that said, “There’s more to life than worrying about gas mileage.”

It got me thinking about how the more scarce you believe the resources you value are, the more you are willing to fight for them.

That seems true to me. After all, children don’t grow on trees and many parents are willing to go to the ends of the earth to protect them. The same is true about toilet paper, baby formula, gasoline…

When we come from a position of abundance, we are more likely to give. Abundance can be a dollar amount but it is more of a mindset than anything else. Which is ultimately another story we tell.

We don’t blink spending $8 on a cup of coffee but if we saw a $98 increase in taxes for education people will notice.

Context matters. It changes the story we tell about the situation we are in. And when we take a step back, we can see that there are more degrees of freedom than how we feel in the moment.

No other species on the planet plans for the future like humans do. And yet…

The marshmallow experiment has taught us that we struggle to act in our own self-interest in the long run.

We sacrifice our health tomorrow so we can eat what we want now.

We spend money on a new car and forgo investing in our 401K.

We continue to release copious amounts of carbon that is destroying the only planet we got.

If we stopped to imagine ourselves in the future, we might be more inclined to better behave. It’s still difficult because we don’t know when our time is up. But when we say yes to everything we want at the moment, we are left bankrupt.

What a predicament.

One of the things that make humans special is that we can act against our instinct.

We constantly overestimate what is going to happen today while simultaneously underestimating what will happen tomorrow.

That is why we are so good at putting something off for our future selves to deal with. If we are lucky, we don’t have to deal with it at all.

The map of the world as we perceive it:

The earth as is:

They are not the same things. We draw these lines as some sort of illusion…

The games we play to define and defend these lines.

“If I take one more step, it will be the farthest away from home I’ve ever been.” – Samwise Gamgee

Fortunately today, we don’t have to cross large bodies of land to destroy a magic ring. “The farthest from home I’ve ever been” can have lots of meaning today.

The one that interests me though is the edge of uncertainty. Home can be our comfort zone. Yet, we create these invisible boundaries for ourselves thinking we can’t cross them because that is unknown territory.

There are many lessons to learn from Tolkien’s world–stepping into the unknown is the start of an adventure.

There are many reasons we are stuck. That is why we maintain a holding pattern longer than we should. Here are some reasons why:

1. We are too afraid of the unknown.
2. We don’t think we have any choice. And yet, in most instances, the only choices left are hard to make.
3. We think that our future selves will be better at solving the problem.
4. We think we lack something. Resources like money, time, energy, education…
5. We have people counting on us and don’t want to let them down.
6. Our ego is too large. We can’t admit when we are wrong.
7. We lack prajna–seeing the world as it really is.
8. Our narration, the story we tell ourselves, is telling a story of inefficiency.
9. We are not accustomed to leaping.
10. We feel the need to ask permission. That the boss will say no.
11. We are looking for safety and reliability, a sure thing, and a guarantee something will work before you begin.
12. We are afraid of failure.
13. Our status is in jeopardy.
14. We don’t want to use the emotional labor it takes to be creative.
15. You occupy your time with email, Twitter, and Netflix.
16. You spam people on LinkedIn instead of going to a conference.
17. You say you have “writer’s block.”
18. Your idea is too large to pull off.
19. After 12 years of schooling believe that compliance is a valuable skill.
20. You have a poor locus of control.

There are lots of things we do to self-sabotage our work. The thing I constantly see is that people simply haven’t made a choice. It is a choice to show up to work today. And when people forget they are making one each day, it enlarges the feeling of being stuck.

It’s us. We are more hubris than any other creature on this planet. The other day, I received a voicemail of morse code. It was a clever scam. I have no doubt that if you deciphered it, it would eventually lead to a conspiracy that would have ultimately led to giving my social security number. The ruse only works if we want something bad enough that we are willing to suspend reality to have it. “Of course, someone out there needs me!”

That’s why Charles Ponzi, a century later, is still remembered because it is a warning for how vulnerable (and gullible) human beings are. Our motives are effective at suspending reality.

Humans continuously classify things to make sense of the world. However, we don’t pause long enough to see that the way we classify objects is all fictional.

For example, a Category 2 hurricane has sustained winds of 96 to 110 miles per hour. If we add one more mile to equal 111, we are now in a Category 3 hurricane. Category 3 hurricanes are considered major and would get lots of news attention. Just by adding that one mile per hour, we change the story of the storm.

All of these stories are made up. Who do we marginalize by the categories we create? What do we over blow? What can we not see because of our point of view?

Once you play with a fax machine for the first time, an early adopter can see that such a tool would be useful amongst the population. The network effect dictates that the more people that used fax machines, the better it was.

In Back to the Future Part II, which was filmed in 1989, they predicted that the fax machine would be an important tool of communication. That every household would have 4 or 5 of these things. Now, most fax machines are confined to an office and are practically obsolete.

While we might be good at predicting something at first, we have a hard predicting the application of something in the long run.